The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  I guess should say a few words about Bombs.

  The thing Liv and Creedmoor dug up from under the World’s Wall Mountains was probably of the same kind as the thing I just plain stumbled upon in the woods outside of East Conlan. What I mean is that it was a word in the language of the world before people like me came over the mountains. I do not know how they learned how to use it. I guess the Folk must have showed them. I guess they made a deal of some kind. I wish they would have been so forthcoming with me, it would have saved a whole lot of hard work.

  I never got the chance to see their weapon in operation with my own eyes and nobody knows better than me that the accounts you read in the newspapers are not always to be trusted, but I hear that it was more sound than light, like a great big drumming that makes everything in the world shake. I hear other accounts that say it was silent and still, that no warning sign of its operation could be detected except that suddenly Engines would fall still, Guns would fall silent. I heard other accounts that spoke of fire or a great dark cloud. Not all of those stories can be true at once and maybe none of them were.

  At the Battle of Juniper it left the Gloriana and Dryden Engines as merely machines, tons of empty metal, so much junk.

  There is a theory that a lot of people hold, myself included, but nobody much likes to write down, that the Gun and the Line are likewise powers of the world before. Some people will say that we drove them mad when we came here and put our names on them and gave them the shapes they wear now. There is a somewhat heretical sect of the Smiler Brotherhood who hold that Gun and Line are therefore a kind of self-punishment for our sins, and that all we need to do is forgive ourselves to be rid of them. I guess that hasn’t worked so well so far but the Smilers are always hopeful, in fact that is their best quality.

  What the Folk entrusted to Liv and Creedmoor must have been something like a cure, or a stick to tame wild beasts. I wondered why they had waited so long to share it and I guess they had no real reason to stir themselves quickly on our behalf. Or maybe they thought we might only make more trouble with it. If half of what you hear about the fighting that followed the Battle of Jasper is true then maybe they were right.

  What I found was something a little different, and more. A more fundamental process— something that struck at the roots of the world. I had to learn how to make it work for myself, and what could be done with it.

  By all accounts, the weapon Liv and Creedmoor found kills the demons of the Gun and the Engines of the Line, but leaves everything else as it is. That is not true of the Process. If you have ever read a newspaper in recent years you know what happens when the Process is fully let off its leash.

  If I had to guess I would say that the Folk who permitted me to see it never thought I would make anything of it. They did not think I would understand. I would guess it was a kind of joke for them.

  Another possibility is that they wanted to see this whole world we have carved out of what was here before blown away, and therefore entrusted this power to fall into the hands of an irresponsible boy. That they saw some madness in me, something unstable, that would take their old science and add something new to it and make something terrible. I guess they have their factions and their disagreements and their politics just like anyone else, and if the Folk I met outside Conlan all those years ago had a plan it is not necessarily the same as the plans of those Liv and Creedmoor met out west. I don’t like that theory so much because it is less flattering to me

  Or it was just an accident. Anyhow I played the hand that was dealt me as well as I could and I worked hard and I guess in a way I made something of myself, just like I always said I would.

  I did my best. I had no choice but to work, but I gave the Linesmen as little as I could. I never wrote down enough of the Process for them to reconstruct it without me, and I introduced errors and impurities wherever I could. I spotted the sharpest minds among my engineers and filed complaints regarding their incompetence, causing seven of them to be relocated to the front before the adjutants got wise to what I was doing. They needed my mind intact or they would have drugged me or tortured me, I have no doubt.

  Despite my best efforts we made progress.

  An experiment with an early prototype of the Bomb cleared a whole city block of abandoned slums, but destroyed the Apparatus in doing so, and the effect could not be repeated. It was judged still too unpredictable for regular military application. I hear the Engines themselves gave the matter their attention.

  I said before that the engineers that they gave me were no good. That was just bluster. The engineers of the Line were very good. All the resources of the Baxter-Ransom Trust and of the Line were behind my work. It was all I could do slow it down even a little. Often I forgot that I was trying to slow it down. The laboratory was a terrible temptation.

  You may recall the ghost I called Jasper, who visited me in the basement of the Ormolu Theater as I worked on the Apparatus. A similar phenomenon repeated itself in the Baxter-Ransom Tower. This time it happened on a mass-production scale.

  Like I said, I worked in the basement beneath the Tower. A whole floor of labyrinthine corridors and echoing windowless rooms had been given to me, and a couple dozen engineers in black coats. We filled the rooms with the wild rotating and humming machinery of the Apparatus.

  There were, to be precise, twenty-three engineers working in those rooms at the time when the phenomenon began to repeat.

  One of the foremen came to me and said, “Sir— I don’t know how to say this, exactly— but there are too many engineers, sir.”

  “I’ve always said that myself.”

  “No, sir— Ransom—you should see this, sir. It’s— peculiar, sir.”

  I followed him. There were, as he observed, twenty-six persons gathered in or at the door to Room Nine, not counting myself. Twenty-six engineers stood nervously by the door, while three supernumerary persons stood in Room Nine. They were dressed like engineers, but, the foreman explained, nobody recognized them and nobody knew by whose authority they had been admitted into the basement. So far as anyone knew, they had simply appeared, in a moment when nobody had been looking.

  The three of them stood facing the Apparatus. Their backs were to us, and we could not see their faces clearly. All three of them had their hands up before them in various positions suggesting surprise or alarm.

  They said nothing and moved little and had a vague and indistinct appearance.

  It does not do to look yellow in the presence of your men, so I entered

  Room Nine, and walked briskly toward the three and spoke to them in a no-nonsense manner.

  “What are you doing here? Did Lime send you? I don’t need any more of you people, I can hardly take a step here without tripping over some incompetent— are you listening to me? Do you know who I am?

  Answer when I speak to you. Listen—”

  I put my hands on one fellow’s shoulder and instantly all three of them retreated— or I should say they receded— their feet not moving nor their hands, their mouths still half-open as if about to say something, all three of them very rapidly leaving backwards through the metal door to Room Nine and taking a sharp turn left to disappear down the corridor. I heard one of the real engineers curse. I cannot describe what it was like to touch that phantom.

  There were more of them over the weeks that followed. By no means all of them looked like Line engineers. There were men, women, children. They appeared without warning, the same way Jasper used to, they said nothing, they disappeared. Some of them looked like soldiers of the Line and one or two looked like long-dead Agents I recognized from illustrations in the story-books. There were ladies in the fine gowns of the Delta baronies and there were hunched-over miners and there were red-faced ranch-hands from out on the Rim. There were Jasper

  City office boys with rolled-up sleeves and Keaton toughs and feather-bedecked Log-Town dancing girls and very old women in black who could have been from any place, any time. Not all of them had expres
sions of panic. Some of them stood all day in the same spot in a corridor, staring at a crack in the wall. The ones who didn’t move were scarier than the ones who did, though you would think it would be the other way around. At first the phenomenon of the phantoms scared some of the engineers so bad that they could not work, and that pleased me a whole lot, but after a little while they got used to it. It is remarkable what you can get used to.

  There were phantoms in fancy old-time wigs like Jasper used to wear. Some of them had an ever older look about them, with the tall hats and buttoned-up coats you see in history-books about the very first pioneers to cross the frozen mountains and settle the West— every one of them had the stern expression of a judge, passing sentence.

  As time went by more and more of the phantoms were Folk, some of them in chains, most of them not— tall, finely painted, long-limbed, sometimes beautiful.

  All the history of the West was there! We should have sold tickets.

  Eventually the phenomenon spread beyond the basement and into the upper floors of the Tower, causing panic among the office clerks and secretaries. For a week a phantom man of the Folk stood in Elevator Six all day, splendidly painted, glaring in an accusatory way at anyone brave enough to get in with him, of whom there weren’t many. He could not be moved.

  One time I woke in the middle of the night in the old man’s four-poster bed to see a figure staring at me from by the moonlit window— I would swear on what’s left of my honor that it was Mr. Carver. As I ran to embrace him and apologize the window blew open and Mr. Carver vanished like he was swept away in the wind.

  Until that moment I think I had imagined, without ever thinking about it, that the phantoms were men and women of bygone days. I had imagined that they were the long-dead, let back into the world by the holes the Process opened— or that the ghosts of the dead were always with us, and it was only by the light of the Process that they were visible. The strange thing was that though I knew for sure that Mr. Carver was dead, seeing him there made me sure he was no ghost, and therefore none of them were, but rather they were people who might have been, and might one day be, in a world that was made differently, and maybe better.

  Well, who knows how strange things would’ve gotten or what other insights I might have had if we’d stayed much longer in that place.

  There was unrest throughout the Tri-City Territory, and everywhere else as well, and the Line’s forces were overstretched and more paranoid even than usual, and so it took a full nine months for them to lay tracks between Harrow Cross and Jasper City, and to build a Station in Jasper fit to house an Engine.

  They constructed it where the old Senate building had stood. They laid tracks right across the city, behind a barbed-wire fence, cutting streets and neighborhoods right down the middle. They built a new bridge. As for the Station itself they built it twice as tall as the Senate had been and three times as wide at the base. It was made all of polished stone and black metal and smoke and it was heavy-shouldered like a vulture. It made a hell of a noise at all times of the night and as it settled itself in it spread out, swallowing squares and parks. Inside there was a maze of corridors and a cavern they called the Concourse, that was big enough to hold an Engine and full of echoes and shadows and shafts of electric-light and foolhardy pigeons. The stone walls were thick as a mountain and built at the Baxter-Ransom Trust’s great expense but they started to crack anyhow, the first time an Engine showed up in town.

  It was the Kingstown Engine, the one that I’d seen back in the swamp all that time ago. Of course I was among the assembled Jasper City dignitaries there to greet it. I can’t say I had any great enthusiasm for shaking hands and making conversation with an Engine of the Line but it beat another day with the phantoms.

  I stood for three hours waiting behind a black railing, between a white-haired old Senator and the man who had been appointed to replace Mr. Carson at the Jasper City Evening Post, whose name I forget, and we all tried to keep our faces calm as the Engine approached— steam first, then noise, then shaking, then a wave of heat that made the skin of your face go tight, then finally the shape of the thing itself getting bigger and bigger, until it is so close and so big that you cannot believe it is real. The Senator’s nerve broke and he turned his face away. I did not.

  Behind me and the Senator and the newspaper man and the other assembled great and good of Jasper there was a huge mass of men press-ganged from all of Jasper’s factory floors. They were all supposed to remove their hats in unison but I guess in the general panic some men jumped the gun and others froze, and there was whispering and shoving and then as the Engine loomed closer and closer there was a sound of panicked moaning— it reminded me of the Yards at slaughtering-time—but I still did not turn my face away from the Engine.

  The Engine brought with it about seven hundred soldiers of the Line and more guns and wire and concrete than I can imagine anyone had any use for. If it still bore scars from what ever injury it had sustained that night in the swamp, I couldn’t see them, but of course it was a mile long and kind of battered and dusty in places, and the far-off parts of the Concourse were in shadow. It sat and steamed while a ceaseless stream of soldiers silently de-boarded.

  My adjutant gave me the signal that I should make my speech, so I stood up straight and approached the Engine, climbing the steps of a temporary scaffold so that I stood beside it, nearly as tall as it was.

  It had no face, only a great black metal mask. I wonder if it knew who I was.

  I cleared my throat, and forgot what ever I was meant to say.

  The Engine was still as a mountain. Heat poured off it.

  “Gentlemen of Jasper,” I said.

  Because I never got to say what ever I was going to say I could, if I liked, tell you that I intended to make a speech of heroic defiance— one that would make my adjutant’s spectacles steam up— one that would tell the Engine exactly what it was, by which I mean that it was a monster, the nightmare of a bad few centuries, a thing that had no place in the new and rapidly-changing century to come— a speech that would give them no choice but to replace me.

  Maybe I would have. Who knows?

  I took a deep breath and I turned away from the crowd to face the Engine itself and I said, “Well—”

  I was interrupted by the noise of a gunshot, and pain.

  I guess it is because I turned when I turned that the gunman in the crowd only got me in the shoulder, not the heart. It hurt like a son of a bitch anyhow and I dropped like a stone to the floor of the scaffold and for a few moments I did not know what had happened.

  I lay on my back. I rolled over to the edge of the scaffold and looked out over the crowd, in the middle of which a very large and very complicated kind of fight had broken out. Among the mass of men in gray and black waves and currents and whirl pools were forming. There was shouting and more shooting and men standing back-to-back and rallying others around them, though I could not tell who was who or what side they were on from where I lay. Sometimes a man in the crowd fell over and a space cleared around him and then was filled again. From my altitude and with my head throbbing as I bled on the scaffold it was hard to tell uniformed Linesmen from Jasper City factory workers.

  After a minute or two of this the Engine quite suddenly lurched into motion, with no warning except a terrible screech, as jets of steam erupted all along its length. It was as if its mind had been elsewhere all that time but now it had fallen back with a thump into its body, like a man sitting down in a motor-car. It seemed to expand and then contract as it began to move backwards out of the Concourse. Its sudden movement caused the scaffold to sway— the floor beneath me tilted— struts snapped and bolts shot loose— and I rolled back away from the crowd, bouncing on my wounded shoulder, and I rolled right off the scaffold, catching myself only at the last moment, hooking the elbow of the arm I hadn’t been shot in around one of the teetering metal struts.

  The arm I’d been shot in was no use and so I could neither pull myself u
p nor climb down. Instead I just dangled there over the hard & distant floor of the Concourse and watched the Engine slowly move.

  I believe it was retreating. Retreat does not come naturally to its kind and you could tell that just by looking at it. Connecting and coupling rods like the arms of giants bent backwards and strained to move wheels bigger than my father’s house. It would have been faster maybe but for the fact that it was still loading and unloading all along its huge body and as it lurched back Linesmen fell from broken planks and rolled beneath its wheels— trolleys spilled cargo, and a lot of it was concrete or canned food or rifles but some of it was rockets, and some of those went off, at 60 yards down the length of the Engine, 160 yards, 300, one by one lighting up the shadows of the Concourse.

  I swung my legs until I was able to catch my foot in a cleft between two struts, and then I tried to kick myself up onto the platform again. When I got my head up I saw that a man had broken from the crowd and was running up the steps of the scaffold— well he was not so much running as he was climbing and jumping. He wore a flat cap and a scruffy beard and a brown jacket and he carried a big red rock in his hand. As he passed me he kicked my arm, not quite hard enough to dislodge me— but then I guess he had bigger game in mind.

  With a cry of, “The Red Valley Republic lives again!” he stood before the Kingstown Engine and he lifted the red rock over his head in both hands.

  Nothing immediately occurred. In fact he had time to continue his speech, saying something about the rights of man and the future and freedom and peace and the little fellow.

  Believe it or not I think I knew him— before the Battle of Jasper City he’d been employed by the Jasper City Evening Post as an editor of some kind, and I had met him in the company of Mr. Carson. But that’s by the by.

  Nothing continued to occur. He lowered the rock and held it in his hands and looked at it like it was very puzzling to him. Then he looked up and into the Engine’s black mask, bigger than a barn, as big and round and blank as the face of the clock on the famous Territorial Tower that used to stand in Juniper City.